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Leonora Carrington's Esoteric Symbols and Their Sources

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Leonora Carrington's Esoteric Symbols and Their Sources M. E. Warlick Leonora Carrington’s Esoteric Symbols and their Sources Carrington’s Esoteric Abstract: Leonora Carrington’s paintings reveal her diverse interests in a variety of occult traditions including Irish Folklore, classical and Mexican mythology, alchemy, witchcraft, magic, astrology, the Kabbala, tarot, and Tibetan Buddhism. In interviews and biographical accounts, she, and those authors who knew her personally, often identified many of the esoteric publications she researched to learn more about these traditions, including those of E.A. Grillot de Givry, Kurt Seligmann, Robert Graves, G.I. Gurdjieff, P.D. Ouspensky, Gerald Gardner and C. G. Jung. This paper examines the visual symbols illustrated in some of these texts in order to establish the range of her transformations of visual source material. Many of these symbols lent their traditional esoteric meanings to her paintings, but the freedom with which she transformed and blended these symbols in her paintings reveal her very personal adaptations and combinations of found imagery. In her complex combinations of esoteric symbolism, her paintings reflect the structure of esoteric publications during the mid-twentieth century, which likewise presented a multitude of esoteric traditions, while pointing to deeper spiritual powers that could be unlocked through their contemplation. Her use of these symbols stemmed from her own ritual practices and reveal the power she infused into her work to activate the unconscious. Key Words: Leonora Carrington, painting, esoteric symbolism 56 SHJ VII, 1, eXc dossier 5, Leonora 1917. URL: http://studiahermetica.com © Copyright 2017. Leonora Carrington’s paintings, sculptures, and literary works have received increasing attention in recent decades, adding evidence to the vitality of Surrealism in the second half of the twentieth century, particularly among its women artists. Scholars have documented the wide range of esoteric themes she wove into her art, including Irish folklore, classical and Mexican mythology, alchemy, witchcraft, magic, astrology, the Kabbala, tarot, the teachings of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky, and Tibetan Buddhism[1]. In interviews and biographical accounts, she often shared the vast range of her research into these topics, citing the many books she read for inspiration. Drawing upon her substantial knowledge of these many esoteric disciplines, she adapted and combined their teachings and traditional imagery in very personal ways. Her son, Gabriel Weisz Carrington, warned against relying too heavily upon these sources to explain her art and remembered with disapproval a scholar who asked for a guided tour of her library in order to help interpret her work[2]. He emphasized that his mother’s art was always the result of her imaginative transformations and blending of these traditions, an observation with which this author thoroughly agrees. Still, it is a worthwhile task to look again at these sources to gauge the extent of her inventions and to determine how esoteric publications in the early to mid-twentieth century reflected her themes and the ways in which she combined them. Details in her art often mentioned, but more difficult to trace and analyze, are the many symbols and diagrams drawn from these traditions, such as magic circles, alchemical and astrological glyphs, and geometric diagrams. These symbols seem to bring magical power to her work. Her son Gabriel also related a fictional conversation with his mother, in which he asked: …if she would agree with me that painting in many circumstances is a ritual approach to managing invisible worlds, as an invocation, and a way to pacify forces that have been unleased, or angered. She might retort with ‘What do you mean?’[3] His posed question and her imagined response raise important issues concerning the role of these traditional symbols within her art as well as her abiding insistence not to be deciphered or analyzed too narrowly. This paper proposes that such symbols, rather than serving merely as marginal decorative elements in primarily figural or landscape compositions, exist as important components to infuse magical power into her imagery. Gloria Orenstein 57 SHJ VII, 1, eXc dossier 5, Leonora 1917. URL: http://studiahermetica.com © Copyright 2017. recognized this kind of power in her symbols stating: “…her paintings become talismans and amulets bearing special powers designed to unlock hidden energies in the viewer”[4]. She compares Carrington’s art to Gurdjieff’s theory of objective art, in which the artist intentionally creates ideals and feelings to convey, although the viewer receives those ideas and feelings according to his or her own level of understanding. This paper will support such attempts to unveil her art as deeply esoteric, and to understand more fully Carrington’s magical practices within her art and within the context of twentieth century views of the artist as magician[5]. Carrington’s connection to Surrealism began in 1936 when her mother gave her a copy of Herbert Read’s, Surrealism, one of the earliest surveys of the movement[6]. Among its many reproductions, an illustration of Max Ernst’s Two Children Menaced by a Nightingale (1924) provoked in her a reaction of deep recognition. That same year the Surrealist exhibition at the New Burlington Gallery launched a broader exposure of the movement among English artists. The following year in June 1937, Ursula Blackwell Goldfinger, a friend from Amédée Ozenfant’s Academy in London where Leonora was studying painting, arranged a dinner so that she could meet Ernst. They fell in love and she moved to Paris to begin a passionate romance that lasted for three years until the Nazi invasion of France forced their separation from a home they had created in Saint-Martin-d’Ardèche in the south of France. Their relationship has also been the focus of much scholarly attention, ranging from occasional portrayals of Ernst’s repressive control of a reluctant femme-enfant to more nuanced recognition of their mutual collaborations and reciprocal creative inspiration[7]. Leonora always credited Ernst as a powerful influence early in her career, but, understandably, she grew tired of the continuing emphasis placed on her personal and artistic relationship with him, at the expense of deeper investigations into her own later works. Indeed, her art changed very dramatically after she moved to Mexico in 1943, where she became part of a dynamic surrealist outpost with other exiled Europeans. Nevertheless, while her early relationship with Ernst remains a vital, but not overwhelming, aspect of her career as a whole, it bears reviving in this context to help analyze her artistic appropriations of esoteric symbols. 58 SHJ VII, 1, eXc dossier 5, Leonora 1917. URL: http://studiahermetica.com © Copyright 2017. Appropriation was basic to Ernst’s working methods as he often reproduced found imagery in many of his early paintings. In one of his earliest alchemical paintings in Paris, “Of This Men Shall Know Nothing” (1923), he directly reproduced a diagram of the relationship between the sun, the moon and the earth during various angles of a solar eclipse which he found in a book on The Heavens by Amédée Guillemin[8]. In the late 1920s and 1930s, he constructed his three collage novels by combining found nineteenth-century wood engravings, a method he also used in the late 1930s to illustrate Carrington’s short stories. In La Dame Ovale, for example, he replaced a woman’s head with a caterpillar to illustrate “La debutante” and for “L’ordre royale”, he superimposed fluid conical diagrams above a human figure[9]. These human hybrids of insects and diagrams forecast some of the figural characters in her later works in which humans often have their heads replaced by butterflies or diagrams, as in her “Portrait of Madame Dupin”, 1947. Ernst’s collaged fusion of a horse and a magpie for her story, “La dame ovale”, echoes Carrington’s painting, Femme et Oiseau, c. 1937, showing the close parallels between their images at the time, as do the many painted and sculpted horses, mermaids and horned creatures that decorated their home in Saint-Martin-d’Ardèche. Ten years earlier at the age of ten, c. 1927, Carrington had designed animal hybrids for a childhood story she had written, “Animals of a Different Planit (sic)”[10]. On a sheet illustrating a winged, horned reptile striding on the long legs of a horse she explained that all of these animals were discovered by a man called Youbitus who had journeyed to Starvinski, a planet far beyond Neptune[11]. A few years later, while studying in Florence, she created a notebook of drawings. The title page, “Florence 1933: A Collection of Extracts” contains bats, a spider and two books, one with the title, “Black Sorcery” and the other, held by a monkey and more difficult to see, is entitled “Magic”[12]. Her interest in alchemy began while she was studying with Ozenfant inspired by his emphasis on the chemistry of art materials. She began collecting books on the alchemy in used bookstalls around London[13]. Clearly these glimpses into her early works indicate that her explorations of hybrid figures, magic and alchemy predated her association with Ernst, although their time together undoubtedly encouraged these interests which would grow and transform in her later works. 59 SHJ VII, 1, eXc dossier 5, Leonora 1917. URL: http://studiahermetica.com © Copyright 2017. In terms of appropriating images, several of her early paintings retain close similarities to her chosen artistic precedents, including her Portrait of Max Ernst, 1937, which she based on “The Hermit” major arcana tarot card, designed by Pamela Colman Smith for the Waite Rider deck[14]. Carrington adapted her source by expanding the arctic landscape of the original and added a frozen white horse in the background. Much like Colman Smith’s “Hermit”, Ernst commands the center axis of the image and carries an illuminated lantern.
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